It’s a lot more like Seaborn. It produces gorgeous plots with a lovely syntax that is quick and easy to use, but it’s not a full drawing toolkit like matplotlib.

If I need the plot to have a very precise aesthetic, mpl is great. But if I want a high quality statistical plot that looks great. ggplot2 will do it in about 2 seconds.

I have no idea how op thinks they could make a decent histogram any quicker than ggplot(data) + geom_histogram(x= x). I mean you don’t even have to leave your shell/editor or extract the SQL into CSV.